The Crowdfunding Upstart That's Turning Freelancers Into Superstars

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The Crowdfunding Upstart That's Turning Freelancers Into Superstars

Image: Courtesy of Cara Ellison

Cara Ellison always felt like something was missing. Although the Scottish videogame critic was an established writer at multiple websites and magazines about games, she had long tired of superficial press junkets and canned press releases. She wanted to do the sort of long-form, embedded journalism with game creators that she saw in music and film, to spend days or even weeks with the creators she thought were making fascinating, important games—even if they weren't big-budget, mainstream titles—and dig into what made those people tick.

The problem was, no one wanted to run it.

"There was just no place for it," says Ellison. It was the sort of writing that always seemed to slip between the cracks: Most video game websites didn't have the time or money to fund it, while most mainstream publications with bigger budgets saw it as niche content. Still, she felt that there was at least a boutique audience that was hungry for this sort of reporting—and willing to pay for it, even if editors weren't. So she turned to a crowdfunding service that she thought would be uniquely helpful for her work: Patreon.

Ellison describes Patreon as a "subscription service, but for one person instead of a magazine." Instead of funding a single project, like Kickstarter or Indiegogo, Patreon provides regular, ongoing income to creators by allowing supporters to automate pledges for a certain number of works each month—videos, articles, comics, etc. Although she didn't think Kickstarter or Indiegogo would be useful, Patreon seemed different: "it was an ongoing thing that would make me produce regular work I was proud of for a small audience that cares."

Since Patreon launched just over a year ago, it has helped fans (or "patrons," as the site calls them) send more than $1.5 million to more than 18,000 creators like Ellison—with at least half of that money sent in just the last two months. Thanks to this recent spike in growth, Patreon estimates that it's adding 150 creators and 850 patrons to their community every day (the site takes a 5 percent cut for operating costs).

These creators—a few of whom are now making as much as $100,000 annually—run the gamut from musicians to webcomic artists, podcasters to activists. They include videogame journalists like Ellison, who has spent the last several months traveling across the UK, France, and America reporting the long narrative pieces she always dreamed about; thanks to more than 400 Patreon readers, she makes more than $2,000 per article. And what she tells me echoes what I hear over and over from other Patreon users: the service allows her to make money from her online audience in a way that nothing else ever has.

Hustle Smarter, Not Harder

For many Patreon creators like Ellison, current models of online fundraising—Kickstarter, digital tip jars, fundraising drives, web advertising—simply weren't cutting it. Rather than being able to devote time and energy to creating the content their fans wanted, they were forced to endlessly pass the hat—an experience that can wear down even the most talented person.

"This generation of webcartoonists has been forced to learn to be entrepreneurs, [which] probably prevents some artists from getting careers... There are a lot of people who really are only cut out for the arts," says Zach Weinersmith, the creator of the popular webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal who now makes $8,100 a month for his comics on the crowdfunding site. "Patreon is good for people like that, since it means they can work without strings attached. To make $1,000 a month selling t-shirts, you'd have to sell and ship something like 100 t-shirts every single month, not to mention watching inventory and making new designs. That's a hell of a lot of work for someone who wants to sit around being whimsical all day long."

Founded by Jack Conte of the band Pomplamoose—a YouTube sensation in its own right—Patreon was designed in large part to help people with YouTube channels find a better way to turn their online audiences into actual money.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

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"It's obvious that monetizing through ads is not the best way to make money from digital media," says Tyler Palmer, the VP of operations at Patreon. "Ads don't reflect how much your audience cares about you. Ad revenue doesn't reflect the strength of a community or a fan base because every viewer, according to an advertiser, is worth 1/1000 of a CPM [the cost-per-thousand-views metric that's the coin of the realm in online advertising]."

Palmer cites an example of one YouTube video—a ukelele cover of "Once Upon a Dream"—that got more than 34,000 views on YouTube, which he estimates might yield around $70 in advertising revenue. "On Patreon, that same video generated over $1,800," says Palmer. While results surely vary, it's a demonstration of how much more powerful Patreon can be than YouTube for creators of regularly released, popular content.

Rebecca Watson, an activist and writer for atheist and women's issues, says Patreon didn't just make her YouTube videos more profitable—it made them possible in a way that YouTube alone simply couldn't. "I enjoyed putting out YouTube videos and I knew they gave me access to an audience that I was otherwise missing, but it took so much time to script, record, and edit," says Watson. "Plus, there was the psychological toll that harassment took...insults, slurs, rape, death threats. I stopped doing videos altogether."

The success of her Patreon campaign, which now pays her more than $700 per video, not only gave her money to pay rent and upgrade her recording equipment, but also "the necessary psychological support that comes from knowing that there are a lot of people out there who value what I'm doing and want to help me continue doing it. I went from giving up on YouTube entirely to doing two videos per week, including a new interview series."

Small Communities, Big Funding

Patreon has been a boon not only for people with popular content, but creators whose work has niche appeal and artists with small but devoted followings. Rather than an audience of millions, a musician or writer might only need a hundred fans willing to pledge ten or twenty dollars each month in order to live far more comfortably.

That's the case with Ally Mack, the creator of a YouTube channel that makes videos for fans of ASMR—short for autonomous sensory meridian response. It's a physical sensation that enthusiasts often describe as a "brain tingle," a very specific soothing sensation produced by stimuli like whispering. Although scientific analysis of the phenomenon is still inconclusive, the people who love ASMR really love it, so much so that they've pledged more than $3,000 a month on Patreon for Mack's videos.

"I've learned that once you have a passionate subscriber base, they want to support you. They want to be involved beyond comments, messages, and likes," says Mack, who takes regular feedback from her patrons and uses it to shape future content. "Patreon allows them to directly invest in you, and witness the immediate gratification of their impact."

Patreon's penchant for enabling small-scale support has also helped numerous writers within the field of video game criticism, particularly writers from diverse backgrounds of race, gender and sexuality whose approaches were more valued by niche communities than large publications. Ellison says she originally discovered Patreon through feminist critics whose work wasn't finding traction at bigger publishing venues: "Lots of different people were using it because they just couldn't get their work on mainstream websites, particularly with their social criticisms about video games. Those places weren't covering it."

"You see more diverse people [on Patreon] as opposed to publications," agrees Mattie Brice, a videogame critic who also focuses on progressive issues in games and supports herself entirely through the crowdfunding site. "Patreon definitely helped me in navigating or adjusting to the fact that traditional games journalism isn't the structure for me."

A Prescription, Not a Panacea

Of course, Patreon isn't a magic bullet. While it can be very effective for creators who have already developed an active fanbase, it's not necessarily going to help you develop one if you're a relative unknown. "What Patreon does is allow people who already like your work to pay you," says Brice. "It doesn't necessarily increase your visibility, it just gives people a structured way to pay you in a very transparent manner."

Mattie Brice.

Photo: Amanda Rhoades

For those creating content in a small niche, there is also the concern of finite resources: If too many people start looking for patronage in a small pond, it may start to dry up, or at least diminish the potential for others to get funded. "When are we going to hit a roof because people in this niche don't have any more money?" says Brice. "There's also that social tension of 'am I hogging this?' You see very clearly how big the room is and how many people are in it."

Nor does crowdfunding entirely mitigate the financial hardships of working as a freelancer, including—for Americans, at least—the lack of health insurance, or the uncertainty of a model as new as Patreon. While Brice now has what she calls a "viable income" through Patreon, she says that she's still below poverty level, and often worries that her crowdfunded income could dissolve at some point.

Working outside of a traditional publication can also deprive writers and other creators of more intangible benefits as well. "There's an obvious point that writers outside of an editorial framework aren't being edited," says Alan Williamson, a videogame journalist and editor of the digital magazine Five out of Ten. "Journalism is a symbiotic relationship where editors and writers work on the structure of a piece, the core arguments of your thesis... turning good ideas into great essays and helping the writer find their voice. Patreon is explicitly a creator-patron relationship that cuts out the middle people."

Despite some of Patreon's limitations, it's hard to get anyone I interview to say a truly unkind word about the service. "I think they're so great that I've convinced at least six friends and (passively convinced) two bitter enemies to join. And I don't even get a kickback," says Watson. "Yet. They've told me they're considering a referral system."

Some creators are pleased not only to have a service that allows them to transform their devoted fanbase into regular income, but also just to discover exactly how much support they have behind them. "I had no idea that people were so willing to support artists that they love," says the YouTube musician known as Smooth McGroove, who is currently earning more than $2,400 a month through Patreon for his a cappella videos. "It's extremely encouraging."

Others are excited about the potential for Patreon's funding model to expand into other fields. "My wife's a parasitologist, and we're gonna look into producing some video lectures on parasitology," says Weinersmith. "Patreon would be a great way to support that. You can even imagine Patreon patrons for a scientist. A young independent scientist could probably be supported on a few thousand a month!"

And while Patreon support certainly doesn't guarantee the quality of a work, or offer the prestige of an established venue, it does help create a space where new types of content can thrive even—or especially—when they aren't supported by either the old guard of traditional media or the new guard of online content.

"That's probably the greatest benefit of a system like Patreon: the ability to exist outside of the mainstream," says Williamson. "Online media in particular is driven by the need to attract hits, unique visitors and sustain advertising and referral link revenue. Just because something doesn't make a lot of ad money doesn't mean it's culturally worthless. In fact, there's a good chance it's worth more than a video of a cat."